Cornelis Dusart

Portrait of a bewigged gentleman, perhaps Simon van Slingelandt

Auction Closed

January 25, 04:44 PM GMT

Estimate

6,000 - 8,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Property from the Collection of A.M. ('Ton') van den Broek (1932-1995)

Cornelis Dusart

Haarlem 1660 - 1704

Portrait of a bewigged gentleman, perhaps Simon van Slingelandt

Black chalk and gray wash with touches of black ink, on vellum; oval

signed and dated, center right: Corn: Dusart. fecit. / 1694

270 by 222 mm; 10⅝ by 8¾ in.

With Parsons and Sons, London, 1934;
Alfred Morrison;
sale, London, Christie’s, 30 March 1971, lot 92 (£240 to Hardy);
with Baskett and Day, London, 1982 (cat. no. 24);
Sale, Amsterdam, Sotheby Mak van Waay, 18 November 1985, lot 103,
where purchased by A.M. ('Ton') van den Broek (1932-1995), Haarlem (bears his mark, not in Lugt, on the mount)

I.Q. van Regteren Altena, 'De voorvaderen van Cornelis Dusart,' Oud-Holland 61, 1946, p.133

Especially towards the end of his lengthy career, Cornelis Dusart made quite a number of finished drawings and watercolors on vellum, clearly intended for sale as independent works of art. Many of these, like the outstanding example in the Abrams collection¹, represent the type of peasant subjects for which Dusart, and his teacher and mentor Adriaen van Ostade, are most famous, but there are also a few portraits, of which this is one of the finest.

The elaborately dressed and wigged sitter has been identified as Simon van Slingelandt (1664-1736), 'Raadpensionaris' of Holland (effectively prime minister of the Dutch Republic). This is certainly a portrait of a distinguished personality, and the features do indeed resemble somewhat his later portrait by Philip van Dijk, but Van Slingelandt would only have been twenty years old when this drawing was made, and had yet to assume any prominent position, so the identification must remain speculative.

We are grateful to Dr. Susan Anderson for her help in the cataloguing of this drawing.

1. Five Peasants in an Interior, watercolour on vellum, 254 by 300 mm; William W. Robinson, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drawings, A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exh. cat., Amsterdam/Vienna/New York/Cambridge 1991-2, no. 98